


Tweet Revenge

by The Librarina (tears_of_nienna)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Holidays, M/M, Twitter, gifs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 05:25:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17115251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tears_of_nienna/pseuds/The%20Librarina
Summary: A semi-epistolary story about true love and a really bad party.





	Tweet Revenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustJules](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJules/gifts).



> Happy Holidays!

 

**Buzzfeed LOL**

**_Man Gets Roped Into Rich Boyfriend's Holiday Party, And His Reactions Have Us Screaming!_ **

December 21, 3pm

by Buzzfeed Contributor

 

You'd think we would all love to get invited to a glitzy holiday party in one of the richest neighborhoods in the country, right? But, as one Twitter user found out, the mistletoe isn't always greener on the other side!

Read on…

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Spending a couple of days with my boyfriend's family in the Hamptons for their holiday party. What did I get myself into??  
12/19, 4:02pm

 

  **@CapitalAire  
** We got picked up at the airport by a driver. Not a Lyft but an ACTUAL DRIVER. Is he a butler? Does he buttle? More importantly: Is my boyfriend Batman?  
  
12/19, 7:33pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** Have now met boyfriend's parents, ergo boyfriend is not Batman.  
12/19, 8:13pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** There are so many pine boughs decorating this house that it legitimately smells like outside. And chanel no. 5. #cliche  
12/19, 9:05pm

 

  **@CapitalAire  
** Boyfriend visibly paled when I said I was going to add 'understated' eyeliner to my outfit tonight. Like it's fine if we fuck but heaven forbid I look queer at the holiday party.  
12/20, 5:11pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Party time. No eyeliner, but I AM wearing cufflinks. Somebody help me.  
12/20, 6:07pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** The coat closet is STAFFED. Like there's a person there taking your coat and everything. Seriously putting a cramp in my coat-room makeout plans.  
12/20, 7:10pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** Also there are so many minks in that closet it's a wonder they haven't gone extinct. You could outfit Narnia with these coats and nobody would even care about the endless winter.  
12/20, 7:12pm 

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** What's in a canapé? Asking for a friend.  
12/20, 7:36pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Gonna call everyone at this party 'old sport.'  
12/20, 7:56pm  
|  
| **  
**@CapitalAire  
Update: no longer allowed to call anyone 'old sport,' though I did make a waiter laugh so hard he almost dropped a tray of champagne. Actually that's probably WHY I'm not allowed to call anyone 'old sport' anymore.  
12/20, 8:10pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Three hours at this party have given me more insight into the causes of the French Revolution than 16 years of public education ever did. #SingSwingSavorTheSting #MadameGuillotine  
12/20, 8:44pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Finally met someone who wasn't talking about the stock market. We talked about e-sports and college and Deadpool. Asked what brought her here and turns out she's on the catering staff. #PutMeInMyPlace  
12/20, 9:05pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Panicked and told someone I was in real estate. I think I might have joined a cult?  
  
12/20, 9:26pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** I'm not sure any of these people have souls.  
12/20, 9:35pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** Everyone just made a toast "to a seller's market" or some shit, and I just laughed and toasted with them. Who AM I?  
  
12/20, 9:42pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** Good news! I pointed out that their predatory practices are going to lead to another recession, so I am kicked out of the cult. #deuces  
12/20, 10:01pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** I've had four glasses of champagne and I'm gonna do a 12 days of christmas with all the bullshit that's happening right now, watch me:  
12/20, 10:30pm  
|  
|  
**@CapitalAire  
** Twelve politicians  
Eleven white guys dancing  
Ten Maseratis  
Nine gentrifiers  
Eight waiters waiting  
Seven closet cases  
Six-figure champagne  
FIVE INSIDE TRADES  
Four pharma bros  
Three butlers  
Two minorities  
And an asshole who thinks I like Trump!  
12/20, 10:42pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Oh. my. GOD. "You probably haven't heard of Elon Musk, but I really like his ideas about privatization." This is a nightmare. This is hell. This is what the dementors will leave me with when they suck all the happiness out of me. Help.  
12/20, 11:37pm

 

This is the last we heard from our intrepid reporter. Wherever he is now, we can only wish him good luck, and godspeed.

 

* * *

 

When Grantaire gets home from the grocery store on the afternoon of the twenty-second, Enjolras is sitting at the kitchen table, scrolling through his phone.

Grantaire hefts the bags onto the kitchen counter with an absent, "Hey," and he starts shifting things into the freezer and the pantry.

He's halfway through the first bag when he realizes that Enjolras hasn't gotten up to help. He hasn't even replied. Grantaire sets down an armload of salad fixings and crosses the room.

"Hey, Enjolras? You okay?"

He looks up at Grantaire, frowning. "You know, if you didn't want to come to the party with me, you could have just said so."

"Hm?"

Enjolras slides his phone across the table. Under the Buzzfeed banner is a headline. **Man Gets Roped Into Rich Boyfriend's Holiday Party, And His Reactions Have Us Screaming!**

And underneath the headline are tweets that are horribly, terribly, undeniably his.

_Oh, shit._

Grantaire sinks into a kitchen chair. "I didn't post that."

"You didn't write those tweets?"

"No, I mean, I _did_ , but I didn't send them to Buzzfeed. I have like two followers on Twitter. I don't even know how they _found_ this."

"That's not the point. That you posted them at all..." He looks hurt, and Grantaire wants to sink into the floor.

"I was venting."

"You were miserable and you didn't even feel like you could tell me. You told the Internet instead."

"I didn't tell the Internet. I told Twitter, which is like shouting into the void for me."

"But you didn't tell _me_."

"I didn't want to bother you. You were stressed out enough. And I wasn't _miserable_. I just...I felt kind of like an outsider, and people were taking up all of your time--which isn't your fault, of course--so it was really uncomfortable."

"I didn't know you felt that way. You know one of those 'soulless real-estate people' is my aunt, right? And the French Revolution dig was kind of mean."

Grantaire struggles not to roll his eyes. "Please. You've said _exactly the same stuff_ , on more than one occasion. Why is it mean when I say it?"

Enjolras shoves back his chair and stands up, pacing across the kitchen. "Because you put it on the Internet! With enough identifying information that it's not impossible for someone to figure out exactly what party you're talking about."

"Come on, the people I wrote about are all too busy trading stocks to spend their time on Buzzfeed--let alone to connect the dots that would lead them back to your parents' party."

"But if they _do_ , it's going to come back on me," Enjolras says tightly.

"Look, I'm sorry that it got posted, but that part isn't my fault. I'll ask them to take it down. Or I'll delete the tweets--if they're embedded, then maybe the whole thing will disappear."

"Fine, but that doesn't mean this didn't happen, or that we don't have to deal with it now."

"You're...actually mad, aren't you?" Grantaire asks, realizing for the first time how bad the situation is.

"You hate my family. I'm allowed to be mad."

"I don't _hate_ them."

"That's not what it sounded like."

Quiet falls, and it takes Grantaire a minute to work himself up to asking the only question that matters. "Are we going to be okay?"

Enjolras bites his lip, a nervous tell that Grantaire hasn't seen since college. "I don't know. I think I just...need a couple of days."

A hollow feeling builds in Grantaire's chest. "A couple of days," he echoes. "What for?"

His voice is carefully controlled, like he's talking to a boardroom or a jury. "Because I don't want to say something I'm going to regret."

 _But it's Christmas_ , Grantaire almost says, but wouldn't that make it worse? Faking smiles for their friends while everything falls apart? He swallows back an argument around the lump in his throat. "Okay," he says instead. "I understand."

Technically Enjolras still lives with Courfeyrac and Combeferre, even though most of his stuff is here--in the apartment that Grantaire has stopped thinking of as _his_ and started calling _theirs_.

Maybe he'd gotten ahead of himself with that.

Enjolras pockets his phone and picks up his keys; Grantaire realizes that Enjolras has been wearing his coat this whole time.

"I'll call you," Enjolras says, but it's never sounded like such an empty promise. He hesitates at the door, like he wants to say something, or kiss Grantaire good-bye, but instead he just leaves.

And then Grantaire is sitting at the kitchen table, alone, while bags of frozen vegetables defrost slowly on the countertop.

He digs out his phone, like he's going to find answers there. The article on Buzzfeed isn't difficult to find--it's on the front page of the humor section, _and_ at the top of the trending page.

How on _earth_ did this happen? The only person who legitimately follows him is @BratEponine, because they've been friends since they were kids. And she would never have sold him out like this. Someone must have searched a keyword and found his tweets in the results.

He opens Twitter for the first time since they came back from New York last night. No one ever sees his tweets, so he hadn't bothered to turn on notifications. But now the overwhelmed app freezes and crashes twice before it finally opens.

The notifications icon has topped out at 999+. That's entirely too much to deal with, so he shuts off his phone.

Grantaire sits down on the sofa and rakes a hand through his hair. "Fuck."

 

* * *

 

He doesn't sleep--or not much, at any rate. It's three days to Christmas and he's going to spend the whole thing alone, and all he can do is stare up at the ceiling and think about all of the ways in which this is his fault.

As soon as the sun comes up, he gives in and calls Bahorel.

"Hey. Remember how I get stuck in my head sometimes?"

"Uh-huh. What's up?"

Grantaire takes a deep breath. "Enjolras and I had--I don't even know if you'd call it a fight, but he left for a couple of days and I'm just…I don't know what to do."

"Shit, man." Only Bahorel could cram that much sympathy into a curse word. "All right. Get your coat and meet me at the gym. We're gonna hit stuff."

Bahorel meets him out front of the ultra-hipster gym where he works, and he uses a day pass to get Grantaire in. He stops in the entryway and gestures expansively to the gym's three floors.

"Okay, so there's lots of options here. You can hit stuff with your hands, or your feet, or with a stick or a saber, it's up to you. Thoughts?"

Grantaire is running on _maybe_ an hour of sleep altogether, and he can't handle that level of decision-making. "I don't know."

"You used to do kickboxing, right?"

"Ages ago, yeah."

"All right. Kickboxing it is."

It _does_ feel a little better, to be doing something. His muscles are burning with effort that isn't quite familiar to him anymore, and it's a welcome distraction from the constant humming thoughts in his head.

"So you want to talk about it, or nah?"

Grantaire aims a kick at the heavy bag. "I don't know."

And Bahorel doesn't push. They warm up for a little while, then gear up and duck into the sparring ring. By then, he's loosened up enough to talk.

"Okay. So we went to his family's holiday party a couple of days ago, and it was weird. So I tweeted about it--"

Bahorel ducks out of range of Grantaire's kick. "You have a Twitter?"

" _Barely_. I have like two followers. Anyway Buzzfeed pulled a bunch of the tweets and made a big deal out of it, and Enjolras found it, and he's upset."

"Upset enough to need a few days, huh? That's...significant."

"Yeah." It's not like hearing it said out loud is _helpful_ , but Bahorel doesn't pull punches in conversation or boxing. It's as refreshing as it is painful.

True to form, Bahorel sweeps Grantaire's legs out from under him a moment later, a move that would never have tricked him if he was still in practice. He hits the mat hard and rolls to his feet. "Hey, remember all those law classes you took?"

"Fuck you," Bahorel says cheerfully.

"No, seriously. As a not-quite lawyer, do you think I can sue them?"

"Eh. _Sue_ them, yes. Win? Not likely. Unless they're protected tweets, there's not a whole lot of expectation of privacy when you're posting to the Internet at large."

"I kind of figured," he says glumly.

"Look, this isn't the end of the world. Enjolras loves you, right?"

Grantaire doesn't say anything. Yesterday morning, he was pretty sure about it, even though they hadn't ever used those words. Today, though...

Bahorel glances a punch off Grantaire's shoulder, just to get his attention. "Hey. Let me rephrase that. Enjolras loves you, okay? If he needs to take a couple of days to sort shit out, let him have that time. It'll all work out."

"Sure it will."

"All right, good talk," Bahorel says. "You ready to work now?"

After that, the warm-up period is well and truly over, and Bahorel keeps him busy enough that he doesn't have time to think.

Grantaire is worn out by the time they hit the showers, enough that he thinks he might be able to sleep for a while. On the way out, Bahorel claps him on the shoulder.

"You can't win a lawsuit, but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do about the article. All they want is clicks, right? Buzzfeed is like, the original clickbait website."

"Yeah. So?"

" _So_...beat them at their own game."

"What do you mean?"

Bahorel grins. "You're a smart guy. Figure it out."

  
  
* * *

 

 **Buzzfeed LOL**  

**13 Tweets About My Boyfriend's Family Party That Buzzfeed DIDN'T Post, Possibly Ruining My Relationship And The Best Thing That's Happened In My Life Thus Far**

December 23rd, 4pm

 

[Editor's Note: Opinions expressed herein are the opinions of our contributor, and should not be construed as the official position of Buzzfeed, Inc. or its subsidiaries.]

 

Hi,

I'm R, aka @CapitalAire. You may remember me from such Buzzfeed articles as _Man Gets Roped Into Rich Boyfriend's Holiday Party_ , where Buzzfeed "reporters" borrowed a bunch of my tweets and posted them without my knowledge or permission.

My boyfriend was _super_ happy to see our business reposted for the entertainment of the Internet at large, so. Thanks.

Now, apparently scraping people's tweets and posting them elsewhere for clicks is legal, although for my money it's kind of a dick move. You could have at least asked.

Fortunately, someone at Buzzfeed felt kind of bad when I told them they were ruining my life, so they gave me a chance to fix things. Or make them even worse, we'll see.

See, the worst part of that article is that the person who pulled those tweets just cherry-picked them for drama. If they'd _tried_ , they could have found the sappy Lady-and-the-Tramp love story at the heart of everything.

But they didn't, so I'm here to do it for you. Yes, I'm going to embarrass myself in front of _the entire Internet_ , because Buzzfeed didn't give me much of a choice.

So. Roll tape.

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** What if they hate me? I mean, they're GONNA hate me but what if he realizes that he's too good for me??  
  
12/19, 9:15am

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** I just realized that our plane tickets are first class. I've never flown first class but I CANNOT let him know that.  
12/19, 4:02pm  
|  
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**@CapitalAire  
** I have champagne and wifi and I'm 30,000 feet above the ground. Omg.  
12/19, 5:53pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** They're not letting us share a room. I KNEW they weren't going to, but this house is so huge that I think he's in another time zone. I'm gonna have to send him nude snaps like a medieval peasant or something.  
12/19, 9:14pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Lol there's a pool in the basement. Everyone's running around getting ready for this party but we just spent like twenty minutes making out in the hot tub and I'm not even sorry.  
12/20, 4:16pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Holy shit. I've never seen him in a tux before. This is a REVELATION. I'm going to need a minute. Maybe several minutes. He looks like a movie star and I want to climb him like a tree.  
12/20, 6:50pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** Everything would be so much better if I was holding his hand right now.  
12/20, 7:02pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** I looked up a minute ago and he was looking at me--I thought I was the only one who did that. He didn't look away either. I really wish the coat closet was better suited to makeouts.  
12/20, 8:03pm  
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**@CapitalAire  
** Like, this party is weird and crappy but ten minutes in the coat closet would completely redeem this evening.  
12/20, 8:05pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** So for like two minutes we got to stand next to each other (no mistletoe in sight, sadly), and he introduced me to a senator?? As his boyfriend?? I know that's what we ARE but it's still sometimes a shock to hear him say it out loud.  
12/20, 9:11pm  
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**@CapitalAire  
** Like, I love him so much that I wouldn't even care if he didn't want anyone to know we're together, but he DOES.  
12/20, 9:14pm  
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**@CapitalAire  
** Just want to add that I'm not drunk I'm just literally this sappy all the time oops  
12/20, 9:15pm

 

 **@CapitalAire  
** He sneaked into my room tonight. Everything about this whole bizarre weekend is 100% okay now.  
12/21, 1:16am

 

So, in conclusion, I love my boyfriend a whole lot, and I'll go to stupid bougie holiday parties with him for the rest of our lives, because he's fucking worth it. 

Now. Link this everywhere so he sees it, okay?

\--R

 

* * *

 

The knock on the door comes at 6:45 on the morning of Christmas Eve. Grantaire spent the night on the couch, because it was easier than trying to sleep in their bed, and the combination of the old couch and yesterday's workout has left him so sore that he almost falls over when he tries to get up.

"Coming," he calls, hobbling towards the door like an old man. When he gets there, he unlocks it and swings it open, without checking the peep-hole.

Enjolras is standing in the hall, looking flushed and slightly out of breath.

"Hi," he says.

"Hey." Grantaire realizes that he's wearing boxers and the oldest t-shirt he owns. Not quite the impression he wanted to make. "You have a key."

"I thought you might have put the chain on."

Like Grantaire would ever, _ever_ lock Enjolras out. "I didn't."

"Oh. Um, I saw what you wrote. Well, Courf saw it, and he sent it to me, and…"

Grantaire shifts his weight awkwardly. "I'm sorry. I don't know if I said that, before--how sorry I am."

"It's okay. I talked to him, and to Combeferre, and they helped me figure it out. I wasn't mad, really. I was...scared."

Grantaire blinks. " _You_. Were scared."

"I thought maybe you hated my family and their drama so much that you didn't want to be with me anymore. That our relationship wasn't worth the trouble."

"No--Enjolras, of course not. Your family could be _actual demons_ and I wouldn't even care. You're worth it, always."

He nods. "I love you, too, you know."

Grantaire's heart twists painfully in his chest. "You do?"

"I have for a long time. I should have said it before, but I didn't know if you--"

And Grantaire can't take it anymore. He catches Enjolras by the collar of his coat and pulls him in for a kiss.

When they step apart, long minutes later, Enjolras grins down at him.

"Next year, wear the eyeliner."

* * *

 

**Buzzfeed Trending**

**FOLLOW UP! 13 Tweets About My Boyfriend's Family Party That Buzzfeed DIDN'T Post, Possibly Ruining My Relationship And The Best Thing That's Happened In My Life Thus Far**

December 24th, 7pm

 

Reader, I forgave him. --E.

 

_Photo: Two men kissing, one blond and clean-shaven, the other dark-haired and stubbled. Their faces are out of focus in the background. In the foreground, the camera focuses on their two hands, holding up middle fingers._

 


End file.
